Everglades Patrol by Tom Shirley

Everglades Patrol Reviews

• 
  Charlie Dennis

  While I disagree with the discussion of the 1982 Everglades emergency deer hunt, I have to agree with the author's political assessment of the 'glades.
  His memoirs of his career were certainly entertaining and brought back a lot of memories. Certainly an eye opener for today's modern day conservation officer.
• 
  Craig Pittman

  Although it's been a national park since 1947, to most of America the Everglades is unknown and unknowable, a mysterious marsh at the bottom of the continent. If they think of it at all, it's when an enormous python or a politician gets a picture taken there. But for Tom Shirley, the Everglades was a favorite childhood playground and a second office
  for the 30 years he was employed by the state of Florida. He knows the Everglades – or rather, as he points out in this engaging new memoir, he knew it, back before the hand of man altered it beyond recognition.
  
  Shirley grew up on the edge of the River of Grass, playing among the sawgrass and catching snakes and alligators for fun. Then, from 1955 to 1985, he served as a game warden working for the agency then known as the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. He was like a cop on a beat, except instead of patrolling in a squad car he was aboard an airboat, and instead of nabbing purse-snatchers, he was after poachers. He became so well known that in 1958 Argosy magazine dubbed him “Boss of the Big Swamp.”
  
  Shirley's book is packed with memories of armed confrontations, long stakeouts, tough-talking characters and frantic pursuits. Underlying it all is a keen sense of melancholy about what's been lost.
  
  Shirley recounts his adventures in a conversational style that sometimes jumps from subject to subject. He is not a polished writer. At times the book reads as if he were paid by the exclamation point. Because this is a work more of memory than research, Shirley also gets some details wrong -- mangling the story about Seminole Chief James Billie’s trial for killing a panther, for instance, and misspelling the name of Harmon Shields, a secretary of the state Department of Natural Resources who went to prison for taking kickbacks. He also misstates the reason why Alligator Alley has been fenced off, suggesting it’s a standard state practice that has thwarted hunter access to the Everglades. In fact it’s supposed to protect wildlife such as panthers from being flattened by traffic.
  
  Still, by telling his stories in such a natural way, a reader begins to feel as if he or she is listening to Shirley spinning yarns while hunkered down at a sputtering camp fire. Some parts of the book paint a vivid portrait of what the Everglades could be like in those pre-drainage days. He describes stakeouts where he'd watch in fascination as barn owls would flock to the tree where he was hiding and hoot at him. He explains how easily he could catch the biggest gator, and why he finally gave up the practice. He talks of spotting a mass migration of eels swimming across an inundated road,and recalls a childhood trip across the Tamiami Trail when “the sky lit up with fireflies – I mean just millions of them! Every place you looked, the sky just flickered like it was on fire.”
  
  In addition to his descriptions of the plants and animals no long as abundant as they used to be, Shirley delineates with great skill another breed that's seldom encountered nowadays: the hard-drinking, hard-living Gladesman.
  
  By far the most intriguing character in the book is one such tough old bird named Sigsby "Sig" Walker,. Walker was a former game warden who originally recommended Shirley for his job at the game commission in 1955, yet later became his most formidable opponent, a kingpin of illegal poaching and moonshining. The irony around their rivalry grows even thicker when you learn that Walker served as a stand-in for star Ron Hayes during filming of the 1961-1962 television show "The Everglades." The show featured Hayes as a South Florida lawman who, like Shirley, patrolled the wet wilderness in an airboat. Because of his Hollywood connection, the folksy Walker had plenty of South Florida fans who took his side against the real game warden who pursued him.
  
  The way Shirley tells it, the two men were the best of frenemies. Once, on patrol, Shirley discovered Walker's moonshine still and shot it up with his ..44 Magnum, leaving a pattern of bullet holes in the shape of an “T” so Walker would know who had messed with his business. Walker wrote up formal complaints about Shirley’s tactics and threatened to file suit for $2.5 million. Later, though, when Shirley's airboat suffered a crack-up that left him stranded far from civilization and desperate for shelter. Shirley found it at Walker's own secluded camp. Walker later led a contingent of fellow Gladesmen into the swamp to repair Shirley's boat for him.
  
  Over the years, Shirley says that whenever he laid a trap for Walker, hoping to catch him with a haul of poached gator hides, the ex-warden would somehow slip through his fingers. Shirley writes that he figured out that Walker had informants inside the game commission tipping him off and he had to fire several officers. However, he provides no further details about the conniving by his colleagues, leaving the reader wondering just how far Walker's payoffs and bribery might have spread.
  
  Soon, though, Walker is supplanted as Shirley’s chief enemy by an even more powerful one, the Central and South Florida Flood Control District. Shirley spares no details in showing how engineers who lacked his first-hand experience with the Glades ruined it by not only altering its flow but also holding so much water back that it drowned the wildlife. His description of deer that drowned in the man-made flood or, worse, survived only long enough to be torn apart by bobcats and other predators is heart-rending. Less detailed in Shirley’s telling of the story, however, is the reasoning behind the agency’s actions: It was holding the water back to prevent flooding in new suburban developments that had crept too close to the River of Grass. Shirley continued battling the engineers who wanted to hold the water too high even when it brought him in conflict with his own agency, which preferred to go along with the politically powerful interests pushing flood control over saving the deer herds.
  
  Eventually his disillusionment with his agency leads to him retiring and becoming an advocate for saving the Everglades -- but saving it for the hunters and anglers to use, not just for those gawking tourists who still think this is a pristine wilderness, and not an artificially managed, heavily engineered simulation of a marsh.
• 
  Chris Edmonson

  Excelleny book written by Tom Shirley, a former FWC officer, who had a career during 4 different decades. Shirley tells many different tales about the living and working in the Everglades. He goes through some of the history of the Everglades, to how airboats became popular, to a lot of the man made problems the Glades struggled through over the years. Shirley also tells some great personal stories about about criminal activity that he's seen and experienced in the Glades, from hunting down alligator poachers and moonshiners to fugitives who have run to the Everglades. In the last part of the book he lays out how the Glades has changed in his lifetime and politics has played a part in the destruction of the area.
• 
  Beth

  I got this book for my middle schooler, but she couldn't finish it. She said it read "like an old guy telling you what things were like when he was young." Well, yeah, that's pretty much exactly what this book is. HOWEVER--I thought his stories were pretty entertaining! I admire his commitment to the Everglades, and have much more understanding of how valuable an ecosystem it is. I wish so much hadn't been lost, and hope that at least some of what is left can be preserved.
• 
  Peter Wilson

  Tom Shirley was a game warden in the Everglades for thirty years. This book is all about his adventures in the Glades....illegal alligator poachers, moonshiners, and more. He talks about how the government drained and flooded the Everglades, and the dramatic impact it had on the wildlife. Tom is not a professional writer, but it doesn't take away from his book. Anyone who visits the Everglades should read this.
• 
  Angela

  A fun book full of adventure. After reading it you gain a whole new perspective on human impact, control, politics, and disregard for the respect of ecosystems. This is a must read for Everglades awareness and education.